mother of bones
by seleneswan
Summary: I could never hold you. —Peter/Wendy.


[mother of **bones**]

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.

.

Wendy had always been a storyteller, a tale-spinner. The perfect girl. The way she wasn't afraid to run or get her hands dirty, the way she could muck around in the mud just as well as any boy.

It was how Peter noticed her, from the way she would coo tales of magic to her younger brothers at night, when they'd all huddle together under their pillow fort. The way her eyes shone from the tightly gripped flashlight.

It was the way she made a world from a few words.

She could make his world.

Peter loved her, in that moment. But she could never stay. And some part of him knew that. But he could never let her go.

.

It was when the Lost Boys were asleep that he took her to see the far coast's stars. Hook wasn't around and her laughter pierced the night like sunlight.

He wanted her to stay forever.

But even as she stood there, joyful, he caught her looking at the sky wistfully, peering somewhere beyond...

She was here, but her soul was out there.

.

She left him.

No, no, musn't think like that. Not forever, not forever. Just for a little while, he was sure. To tell her parents goodbye. To tell them she was never growing up. To tell them she was staying with him.

He perched on her window sill waiting for her return. He could hear her laughter-somehow so much stronger here, so much more _alive_-

_No, no musn't think like that._

_Not forever, not forever._

And so he waited.

.

She didn't return.

.

"Oh, Peter..." she whispered.

Her husband cocked his head and glanced at her over the rim of the morning paper. "Thinking about other men?"

She shook her head wistfully, staring up at the early morning, late night sky, wringing her fingers together. "Just a boy from the past."

He hummed in assent.

He didn't notice her eyes welling up with tears nor the way she touched the window sill.

He didn't notice the words murmured under her breath, "...trust and pixie dust."

.

He visited her when she didn't notice. She'd kept the house, but she'd grown. She was a grown up now, and he hated her.

Hated her for leaving him, leaving all of them, growing too fast, and moving on. Without him. And desperately all he wanted to do was wake her up from where she was laying, breathing so deeply, so quietly...curled up against someone else.

He still remembered how her hair felt against his shoulder, the tickle of her breath against his ear as she whispered childhood trade secrets.

She roused, then, and he shrank into the shadows, watching as she moved to the nursery and gazed down at the life inside the bassinet and then to the window on the far end of the room.

It was then that he noticed the hand painted mural on the far end of the room, the drooping trees and the familiar slopes of his world, of Neverland. And there, on the edge of the cliff side, a girl in a blue dress and himself.

He didn't understand the thickening of something in his throat, the burning in his eyes. Instead, he flitted out the open window, taking his shadow with him, trying to leave the memories behind.

.

He returned the next year, deliberately sitting on her windowsill, waiting.

"Wendy," he said hoarsely, as she walked into the room with a basket of laundry. Her eyes widened and she slowly set the clothes on the bed, walking towards the window, disbelief written all over her face.

"Peter?"

"Wendy," he repeated, this time familiarity coming back to him too quickly. The cocky smirk placed itself on his face, and he leapt from the window and onto the dresser. "Let's play a game."

"Peter, what-"

And then the anger that was usually kept for Tinkerbell bubbled to the surface and he turned on her, snarling. "You grew up."

"I...I had to."

He turned away. "I have to go."

"Wait-"

And he jumped from the window into the dusky sky.

"_Peter!_"

.

He only returned at night, then. Year after year on the same day, and would watch her and her life go on. Watch the way wrinkles made themselves known on her face. The way she retouched their mural.

The way she hummed tunes from a long lost dream around her home.

The way brown turned to grey and the way she brushed her hair at night.

And every time, felt as though...he were being left behind.

.

"Peter, I know you're there," she said one night, turning to the window, folding her wrinkled hands over the edge of the table, pushing herself up as she shuffled around.

He didn't emerge.

"I'm quite old, aren't I? Seventy four this September," she said, all bittersweet and nostalgia. "To die would be an awfully big adventure, wouldn't it?"

He didn't say anything.

"I can't run away with you," she said.

"Why?" he asked, finally, slipping out of the shadows. "Why not?"

"Because I had to grow up. And I did. And it was wonderful."

"You were supposed to stay. And read stories and keep everything in order. And be our mom...be my girl. And we would have taken care of you, the Boys and I. I loved you," he finally said, desperately, as if she were smoke in the wind, hard to see at times and even harder to catch.

Her lips twisted upwards, then. "And I you, Peter, and I you."

.

He couldn't find her the next year.

Or the year after that.

Or the one after that.

And finally, he forced himself to look. He opened his eyes and flew to the last place he wanted to. And found her nestled amongst the wildflowers. And knelt at her headstone.

And focused his eyes on the words he couldn't read too well, mouthing out the sounds, tracing them with his fingers.

And he wept.

.

_Wendy Darling_

_Loving Mother, Wife, and Friend_

_"Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting."_

.

.

* * *

**notes**: THEY ARE THE MOST TRAGIC CHILDHOOD TALE/DISNEY COUPLE EVER.

_ahem. _that is all. review?


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